Spooks Get New Workout Routine? For Their Minds

The Caveman Ughlympics, the Cat-olympics, the E?lympics ? seems like everyone has caught five-ring fever. Even the intelligence community. To prepare, it?s gotten a new workout routine from a very unlikely source ? social science. To bring home the gold in the ?Analytical Olympics?, intelligence analysts will have to embark on training regimen unlike any other. All in their head.

The mental workout routine was outlined in a recent report by the National Research Council, which suggests practical ways to apply insights from the behavioral and social sciences to the intelligence community. This isn?t the first time the government has looked to social science for advice ? the controversial Human Terrain System project embeds researchers into combat units to improve understanding of local circumstances and cultural traditions. This report is a little different. Instead of sending social scientists overseas, it uses their expertise to consider the ?critical problems of individual and group judgment? among analysts at home.

So what exactly are these problems, and how can social science help solve them?

Let?s start with the individual. Every day an analyst has to sort and evaluate a barrage of incoming facts, stats, and figures to come to a coherent understanding of an issue. This involves a lot of thinking and decision-making ? which falls squarely into the domain of psychology. The report focuses many of its recommendations on research ?regarding how individuals think.?

It mentions several known psychological quirks that can obscure that thinking. Hindsight bias, or the ?knew-it-all-along effect,? is the tendency to exaggerate how well you could have predicted an event, after the fact. Outcome bias is the tendency to judge decisions by how things turned out, rather than by how well the decision was made. These biases are universal, but certain ?de-biasing? exercises can help. The report recommends that all analysts be required to ?consider alternatives to a known (or assumed) outcome and identify events or data which would support alternative assessments.?

Of course, they would do all this while participating in the ?Analytical Olympics,? a competition for analysts to see who makes the best predictions and has the most appropriate confidence levels. Guaranteed fun.

On the more social side, the report considers what can go wrong when people interact and communicate, and what to do about it. The roughly 20,000 analysts in the intelligence community are scattered across 16 offices and agencies, so there?s bound to be some miscommunication. The science says that people tend to exaggerate how well they?ve understood others, don?t realize they are using jargon (even words like risk, accountable and secret can change meaning depending on who?s talking), and they guess wrong about what ?goes without saying.?

What to do? Once again, the report has a specific workout designed to beat those communication errors. Manipulation checks would have someone interpret an analysis, and then compare it with the original intent of the analyst. Think-aloud protocols would have people just say whatever comes to mind as they?re reading an analysis, to detect any misinterpretations. And to top it off, throw in a little inter-departmental cross training to get analysts to experience different roles, take on new assignments, and see new perspectives. Hopefully swapping places with a CIA agent for a day will give an analyst ?greater flexibility and insight when dealing with a new situation.? That is, if they ever make it back to work.

And if all that doesn?t get the heart rate up, the report advocates ?Idea Tournaments? to promote collaboration and innovation. Increasingly popular in the private sector, tournaments may work particularly well in world of intelligence analysis, by encouraging novel thinking among people with very different abilities and skills.

The report has many more recommendations on everything from hiring practices (measure cognitive ability directly and don?t rely on proxy measures like a college degree) to homework assignments (require all analysts to be familiar with probability theory, statistics, and game theory). But that?s quite enough of a workout for today.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons; photoshopped by Lena Groeger

Source: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/06/spooks-get-new-workout-routine-for-their-minds/

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